


oh well, whatever, nevermind

by ladymemebeth



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: 90's Music, Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, First Kiss, Jewish Richie Tozier, M/M, Pesach | Passover, Prom, Recreational Drug Use, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris Are Best Friends, Underage Drinking, beverly marsh's views on madonna do not reflect the author's own, spring 1994
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2020-11-26 14:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20932052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymemebeth/pseuds/ladymemebeth
Summary: richie constructs intricate rituals which allow him to touch the skin of other boys, namely eddie.everybody else constructs intricate rituals which allow them to smoke the weed of other people, namely bev.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ok initially i wanted to write a fun one-shot about the losers getting high at the quarry but then it uh. turned into this. 
> 
> (tagged as AU b/c i am pretending that they all stayed in derry long enough to graduate high school together.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for discussion of suicide (specifically kurt cobain's).

There might eventually come a day when Richie wouldn't be able to remember Derry or the sewers or any of them. Sometimes Richie longed for that, imagining that the part of his brain that held those memories could be scooped out with a melon baller. At seventeen, it was hard to imagine that escape from Derry and the memories was possible.

Maybe he should have known to doubt the strength of his memory, deteriorating as it was from the near-constant presence of Beverly's weed. She was the only one of them who had the balls and the money to actually buy the stuff, and it was better than cigarettes, not that Richie or Bev had stopped smoking those either. It comes from the earth, Richie had explained the first time, trying to convince Eddie and Stan.

“You know what else comes from the earth, Trashmouth? Fucking hemlock,” Eddie snapped.

“Poison ivy,” added Stan.

Richie rolled his eyes. “This is why people call us losers, you know.”

“We call  _ ourselves  _ that,” Bev pointed out.

It was late March of senior year, the sunlight bright and cold and stretching later and later into the afternoons. It was getting harder to care about school. Not that Richie had particularly cared in the first place—God fucking forbid—but he had tried, really, even managing to submit his college applications on time, against all odds. Time was starting to unravel, and it  _ was _ harder to remember things from back then. Sometimes. Sometimes it came back and Richie would call the others in the middle of the night, cupping his hand around the telephone receiver while standing barefoot in his boxers in the kitchen, whispering like he was at a sleepover.

“The motherfucker came back,” he told Mike, feeling thirteen again. Always thirteen, newly teenaged and regretting every moment of it.

“No, it didn't,” Mike said softly. Richie had once compared Mike’s voice to velvet, and he had smiled at the ground, bashful. “It can't come back, Rich. It was a dream. Not real."

Richie wanted to believe him. Mike always knew what he was talking about in his steady velvet voice so it had to be true. 

Eventually Eddie and even Stan conceded that being stoned was fun and Richie took to driving any number of them down to the quarry to smoke after Eddie's track meets were over. He and Bev usually slunk around the perimeter of Derry High’s campus once the school day ended, sharing a cigarette and griping about the others' dedication to their extracurricular activities. Stan with the debate team, Bill with his chess club, Ben in the library, dutifully completing his homework every afternoon despite Richie and Bev’s jeers. Mike with the farm, of course, though they decided that didn’t really count. Eddie with track, running around in circles.

"Like a chicken with its head cut off," Richie said.

"My head is stuck on just fine, thanks," Eddie replied, tying his sneakers tighter. Richie watched the flesh of his fingers go white when he pulled hard on the laces. Beneath the hem of his running shorts Eddie's skin looked unnaturally pale, deprived of sunlight during the harsh Maine winter. Richie stuck his fingers behind the lens of his glasses to rub at his eyes. It was still weird to see Eddie on a sports field, sans inhaler, the muscles in his thighs shifting as he warmed up before a race. The fragility that had been so central to Eddie’s existence as a child had been replaced by a stubborn commitment to physical recreation, even though he sort of sucked at everything. Track had been the thing he sucked at the least, so he stuck with it until they all had to admit that by senior year he sucked marginally less at the 100m dash. 

On the afternoons where they didn’t go to the quarry to get high, Richie still usually drove Eddie home from track because Sonia would never allow Eddie to drive his own car. For all her rants on road safety, Richie knew that Sonia’s so-called concern was rooted in a desire to keep Eddie trapped in Derry, forever dependent on her and her alone, so Richie had taught him how to drive the summer before senior year between shifts at the Aladdin. It had been an anxious, foulmouthed affair that threatened to end their friendship multiple times and put Richie’s precious Toyota Corolla in more peril than he would have liked, but Richie knew that Eddie had been grateful for the illusion of freedom the process provided him—that, at least in theory, he could hop in a car and drive the hell away from this place at any time. Eddie, like Bill, still mostly used his bike to get places anyway. The attachable bell and the playing cards stuck in the spokes had long since been abandoned or otherwise torn off, so now Eddie just yelled really loud to signal to pedestrians.

Besides, he didn’t mind waiting for Eddie. He knew how it looked to the other kids, Richie in the backmost row of the bleachers during Eddie’s meets, a paperback opened to a random page in his hands as if he would do anything besides watch Eddie during the hour and a half he was on the track. It was kind of weird to watch him like that, from afar, talking to the other guys on his team with a body language that was unfamiliar to Richie. He smiled more when he talked to them but Richie knew the flash of teeth was just a reflex. The real smile was reserved For Losers’ Eyes Only, though it did occasionally appear after Eddie beat his own time in a race and Richie could see how brightly it lit up his face even from all the way in the stands. He had always watched Eddie, anyway, from the corner of his eye, across rooms and streets and fields. He was easy to watch, darting around in sharp movements like...some kind of squirrel, maybe. Richie guessed that made him the dog, easily distracted except for this one thing. First it had been out of a desire to protect Eddie, keeping an eye on him the way the way you would a little brother, but then it grew into something else that was definitely not brotherly. After so many years he had gotten good at watching and not saying anything—the one time he actually kept his mouth shut. It was just a crush, royally idiotic by even Richie’s standards, but it was something that would go away once they had dispersed across the country and Richie wouldn’t be the only gay person in a hundred-mile radius. It was the one upside he could think of when he thought about the Losers all parting ways at the end of this summer. That and finally being out of this fucking town.

He knew how it looked to the other kids but by that point he didn’t really care. Bowers was locked up in Juniper Hill and Hockstetter was dead and the rest of their gang was rendered basically useless without their psychotic leader’s orders. The other kids had gotten more lenient with age, maybe because they were bored of it. Calling the same people by the same insults had gotten old after ten years.

What he didn’t know was how it looked to Eddie. 

Eddie didn’t talk much after his meets. Tired, Richie guessed as he reached to lower the radio volume slightly. The drone of Gibby Haynes’ voice grew quieter as Richie pulled out onto the main road.

Eddie had wanted to know what the hell kind of band name was Butthole Surfers anyway when Richie got the cassette in the mail.

“I think it’s funny,” Bill offered, tripping over the last word.

“He just likes them because he wants an excuse to say butthole,” Stan pointed out, not inaccurately.

“Oh, Richie,” Bev sighed, feigning exasperation the way she always did. “You’re just so rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.”

That was the thing: it had occurred to him early on that the other kids and the occasional teacher would laugh at him regardless, so he figured he would give them a reason to laugh. Even when his jokes fell flat (as they often did), he was satisfied by the situation because he had  _ made  _ them look at him. Where most people had a fear of public speaking, Richie relished any opportunity to get up in front of the class and feel the weight of everyone’s eyes on him. He was in control. No one could snicker behind his back or spit in his direction or sneak up from behind if he was facing the entire class simultaneously. Jokes were easy: throw in a couple references to dicks and someone was bound to crack a smile, even if it was out of pure discomfort. Richie was happy to fill what he felt was the necessary position of class clown, though he didn’t really like that particular phrase anymore. 

Taking things seriously was hard. There were times when he wished he could be quiet, like Ben, who often stayed silent in conversations not because he had nothing to say but because he was thinking of exactly the right way to say it. And sometimes he was almost jealous of Bill’s stutter (though he would never say that to anyone, obviously) because at least it forced him to slow down. It wasn’t like Richie was  _ stupid _ , though Beverly frequently called his emotional intelligence into question. It’s just that the words that came so easily to him in the context of a joke seemed to freeze in his throat every time he tried to be sincere. Trying to cough up a believable sob story for his college essays had been a truly daunting task. He finally cobbled together a series of somewhat-related thoughts about music and hoped that his rabid passion for the subject was enough to make up for the complete lack of organization and inevitable spelling errors.

He generally tried not to think about his college applications now that they had been released into the oblivion of the US postal service. They were probably sitting at the bottom of a dumpster somewhere in California, if the admissions people hadn’t decided to keep them to give everyone else in the office a good laugh.

Richie reached across the gear shift and ran the tip of his finger down Eddie’s sleeve. “You sleepy, baby?” Stupid joke pet names were easy. Real feelings were hard.

“Shut up,” mumbled Eddie. 

“‘Cause I can turn this car around and bring you right back home. You can take a nap while your mom and I catch up with each other in private, if you know what I mean.”

“Beep, beep,” came Eddie’s reply, muffled by the collar of his sweatshirt where he had tucked his chin.

“How’d the meet go?” he asked, as if he hadn’t been there the whole time. What was the point of asking how someone’s day was when you saw them, at a minimum, every hour on the hour? And still he asked, because he almost always wanted to hear Eddie’s opinion. When Eddie failed to answer, Richie glanced sideways to study his slumped figure in the passenger seat. He knew something had to be wrong because Eddie didn't immediately demand that Richie keep his eyes on the road.

“Eds?” 

“Don't call me that.” The old routine. 

“Come on, man,” Richie tried. “What’s going on?”

Eddie let out a long breath so his lips vibrated together, like blowing a raspberry without the tongue. Richie did not think about Eddie’s tongue. “It’s just, like…” Eddie paused. “I thought it would be better by now.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Like. I dunno, it’s stupid. But I kept setting these ultimatums for myself. It’s called coping,” he added defensively, though Richie hadn’t said anything. “I kept telling myself, like, OK, once you’re sixteen you’ll feel better. Once you’re seventeen. Once you get kinda good at track you’ll feel better. Once you apply to college, once you turn eighteen…” He sighed. “Now it’s once you get out of Derry, and I feel like...” He trailed off.

Richie made a humming noise to indicate he was listening. See? Manners. When they reached a red light, he turned to look at Eddie. He had always been short especially compared to Richie, but in that moment Eddie seemed extra small, like he had been when they were kids, forever on the verge of breaking.

“Well, now I don’t know if it’s going to happen. Like, maybe I’m just going to be like this forever.”

“Like what?” The light turned green and Richie, nervous, pressed too hard on the gas so the car lurched forward. He could practically feel Eddie’s scowl at the sudden movement. 

“Like, I don’t know, Richie, totally fucked up forever about a goddamn clown? Or my mom? Like, somehow more fucked up about my shitty mom than the aforementioned clown?” Eddie’s voice sounded like it did when he was drunk or about to cry. Turning onto his street, Richie resisted the urge to make a joke, forced himself not to panic at the thought of having to come up with something to say to make Eddie feel better. He needed the words to come out right and he wasn’t sure how to make that happen. This was way more important than his college essays. He pulled into his driveway and cut the ignition.

“I think,” he began, then stopped. He drummed his fingers against his thigh. 

“There’s a first,” Eddie said, and Richie finally turned to look at him.

“Asshole.” 

“Trashmouth.”

“I think maybe you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Richie said, turning away again. He studied the hairline crack in the windshield, the result of a rock that had missed its intended target of Bill’s outstretched hands.  _ That’s what you get for playing catch with fucking rocks _ , Stan had sniffed. 

Eddie moved his shoulders up and down. “Sometimes I wish my mom had been right. Like, I wish I was really sick.” 

Richie scrunched up his face in confusion. “What the fuck?”

“I don’t know. I liked thinking I had a reason to feel so shitty.”

“I think clown-related trauma is a pretty good reason, Eds.”

For the first time in maybe forever, Eddie ignored the nickname. “Yeah, but you’re not all fucked up about it. Everyone’s fine except me.”

“Dude, I don’t think that’s true.” They were bound by it, all the bizarreness and blood and bad memories, but they didn’t talk about it, not really. Except at night, when the shadows cast by piles of dirty laundry looked especially menacing, and Richie ran to the telephone again in the hopes that someone would pick up. He never called Eddie because he knew his mom would have a conniption if she caught Eddie on the telephone past midnight. Of course there were times when he was tempted to call him—really tempted, the Kaspbraks’ number already half-dialed out of pure muscle memory—but he always made himself hang up the phone. Mike was usually awake and Bev had gotten her own phone line from her aunt on her sixteenth birthday and Richie was so grateful for them, always. But they weren’t Eddie. The tones of their voices didn’t immediately slow the racing of his heart like a hand held warm against his chest. 

“Do you think we’ll still remember It when we’re older?” Eddie asked.

“Probably.” Richie wanted to tell him that he sometimes felt suffocated by the weight of his memories, the paranoia that ran his brain ragged. That, deep down, he knew this was something he would have forever, as much a part of him as his shitty eyesight. But he wasn't really sure if that would make Eddie feel any better. “Maybe we’ll luck out and get dementia really young and we can live out the rest of our lives in senile bliss.”

Eddie huffed a laugh. “Maybe you’ll hit your head and get amnesia.”

“Oh, sweet, I could adopt a new identity! Like on that episode of  _ ALF _ .”

“Any identity besides the one you have now would be an improvement.”

Richie reached over to pinch Eddie’s cheek. “I know you don’t mean that, baby.”

Squirming away, Eddie replied, “I do mean it, you freak.”

“You do not.” Richie stuck out his lower lip in an exaggerated pout.

“Do, too.”

“Do not.”

“Do t— Goddammit, Richie! You’re such a fucking kid.” But Eddie was smiling, one of those real smiles, and it looked way better from a few inches away than it did from the bleachers. Richie’s stomach felt warm and syrupy. 

“D’you still wanna come inside?” He inclined his head towards his house. 

“I have a psych test I need to study for,” Eddie said, which wasn’t a no.

“Great! I can be your case study. Psychoanalyze me. I’ll tell you about my sexy dreams.”

Eddie rolled his eyes and pushed open the car door.

“Is it still an Oedipal complex if I want to fuck  _ your  _ mom instead of mine?”

“Shut the fuck up, Richie.”

  
  


There wasn’t much to do in Derry even when you had a tank full of gas and a car full of friends. Beyond school and extracurriculars, a person could choose from a menu of such delightful and diverse activities as driving to Bangor to wander around Wal-Mart, watching the sheep on Mike’s grandpa’s farm (despite Richie’s pleas, Mike never let him get close enough to touch them), and seeing  _ Ace Ventura: Pet Detective _ for the dozenth time at the Aladdin. Hence the frequency with which they revisited their woodsy childhood haunts: there really weren’t any other options.

Ben had lugged his boombox down to the quarry from the trunk of Mike’s truck. “Fuckin’ Radio Raheem over here,” Richie said appreciatively as Ben set down the bulky machine on a somewhat level rock. Bev sat on the ground with her social studies textbook in her lap, rolling a joint across the portrait of George Washington that grimaced at them from its front cover. 

“Shut up,” Ben replied mildly. “We brought it for  _ you _ , Richie, so you can play us one of your ten million mixtapes. Because we’re really good friends who support your interests.”

“ _ My  _ interests? This is for you, man. I think I read somewhere that it’s been scientifically proven that listening to Marky Mark on repeat causes permanent brain damage.” Richie dumped out the contents of his backpack to sift through the candy wrappers and crumpled up papers. There were always a couple cassettes floating around at the bottom of his bag. “I’m protecting you guys from yourselves.”

“Because that ‘I’m too sexy for my shirt’ song is  _ so _ much better,” Stan said.

“Staniel.” Richie looked at him gravely, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Please do not besmirch the good name of Right Said Fred in my household. Unlike yourself,  _ some _ of us have managed to get sick of ‘Check Your Head’ in the two years it’s been out.”

“Whatever.” Stan held up his hands in defeat, though Richie knew the Beastie Boys comment had genuinely pissed him off. “Bev, are you done?”

The afternoon passed like any other. Richie played a tape of weird old French songs that his mother had shown him and he had privately fallen in love with. Stan laughed himself into a coughing fit with some joke he made about saving a seat in the circle for Elijah like you were supposed to do at the dinner table on Passover. The idea of a Hebrew prophet smoking weed was unspeakably funny to him and him alone, and every so often he would seemingly remember his own joke and start laughing again. Richie rolled his eyes but inwardly he was glad to see Stan in such a good mood. He had been weird lately, the way they had all been weird since they started their senior year, caught up in themselves and the sudden nearness of the future that had once seemed so unbelievably far away. He remembered his conversation with Eddie in his driveway the afternoon before, the genuine concern in his voice. He wanted so badly to promise him that they would all forget but Eddie would know that he was lying. 

His head felt heavy, a deadweight. Useless. He focused his gaze on Eddie's left ear, facing him as it was from Eddie's position on a slab of quartz, blown pink and almost transparent in the late afternoon sunlight. He needed a haircut, Richie noticed. He was always watching Eddie, but when he was stoned he really allowed himself to  _ look _ : at the fine spread of his dark eyelashes, the delicate skin of his throat. Richie imagined his glasses were X-ray goggles but instead of seeing through Eddie’s clothes Richie could see past his skin to his skeleton, see the thread of a shadow across the bone in his right arm where it had dislodged and Richie had fit it back together screaming. He imagined he could see Eddie’s guts and his veins but it was okay because it was all on the inside this time, safe, like it ought to be. Distantly, he wondered what the fuck strain of weed Bev had gotten this time.

Stan got up to wander. Mike watched the periwinkle of his perfectly pressed polo shirt disappear into the brush surrounding the quarry. Ben and Bill watched Bev pass the joint back to Richie, their eyes following the cloud of smoke she exhaled a moment later. For all the time they spent together, the incessant ribbing and the fierce love behind it, there was a lot they didn’t say. Maybe it wasn’t just him. Maybe it was being seventeen or maybe it was this town and the things that had happened in it that were just beyond words. 

In the first week of April the temperatures inched higher and Bill received an acceptance letter from Sarah Lawrence and Kurt Cobain’s lifeless body was found on the floor of his greenhouse in Seattle. Richie lay in bed that whole weekend, listening to  _ In Utero _ and chainsmoking in what he hoped was a clandestine manner out of his bedroom window. It felt like his room was a spaceship and a hole had been punctured in the roof, sucking out all the air and leaving Richie lightheaded and utterly wrong. He knew drugs were involved but he still couldn’t imagine it, the definiteness of such an act. No do-overs, no takesies-backsies, no “just kidding!”s. You had to commit to the bit. He thought about the depths of the sewers, Beverly frozen in midair, all the blood. He had never been so scared in his life because he had never been so literally hit over the head with the reality of death, even with Georgie and everything. He remembered realizing how badly he wanted to live, all the shit he hadn’t done yet. How that desperation had made him unafraid all of a sudden. 

On Sunday night a knock came at his bedroom door. “I’m fine, Ma!” he yelled from under his covers, but the door inched open to reveal Eddie’s face, pinched with worry.

“Hey, it’s the Spaghetti man,” Richie said, attempting a smile. His voice was raspy from disuse.

“Hi, Richie.” Eddie sat next to him on his bed. He picked at the Millenium Falcon-patterned sheets with delicate fingers, as if he was concerned about the cleanliness of Richie’s bedclothes. Which probably wasn’t such an outrageous assumption to make, if Richie was being honest.

“Look, I know your mom was probably wondering where I was all weekend…” Eddie rolled his eyes but allowed Richie to finish his spiel, which was its own kindness. “I ached to think of her, all alone, worried sick, horny as hell without anyone to satisfy her...But still, you didn’t have to come all the way over here on  _ her  _ behalf.”

Eddie shoved at Richie’s knee. 

“You’re such a devoted son,” Richie said.

“I wanted to see if you were OK,” Eddie told him.

“Thanks.” Richie didn’t know what else to say. 

“It’s really sad…”

“Don’t worry about it, Eds.” Richie knew that Eddie didn’t really care about music the way he did, with a clinging sort of worship, and that was OK. It was stupid anyway, Richie knew, to love something that couldn’t love you back, to mourn someone whose life had only been shared with yours through records and photographs. And yet he still did it, the way he always did the things he knew were stupid.

“I just wanted to make sure you’re OK,” Eddie repeated. “So if you tell me you are, I’ll leave. Everyone else is worried, you know. Bev is annoyed you aren’t answering her calls.”

Richie hadn’t even heard the phone ring. “Thanks. Sorry.”

“So are you OK?” Eddie shifted slightly, brought his leg onto the bed, so he was looking directly at Richie. The concern in his gaze made Richie want to scream or hold him very close or maybe both simultaneously.

“I haven’t showered in, like, ten days. And I think I might be getting bedsores.”

Eddie wrinkled his nose but plowed on. “Answer the goddamn question.”

Richie sat forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “Yeah, I’m OK. Thanks for the

concern, babe.”

“Fucking weirdo.” Eddie narrowed his eyes. “You sure?”

“Yes,  _ mother _ ,” Richie intoned. “Your bedside manner is really naggy, you know.”

“I learned from the worst.”

Richie hummed sympathetically. “How’d you convince the old lady to let you out on a school night anyway?”

“I told her I was going to Bill’s to work on a physics project. Last minute volcano emergency or whatever.” Bill was the only one of them that Eddie’s mother didn’t actively try to prevent her son from seeing. It was probably the dead brother thing, though Richie wouldn’t put it past Sonia to turn even that into a reason why Eddie was forbidden to hang out with him. “She doesn’t even know that Bill and I haven’t been in the same level of science since, like, third grade.”

“I’m telling Bill you said he was dumb.”

“I’m telling Bev that you ignored her calls on purpose.”

“I’m telling Stan that you actually, sincerely hate the Beastie Boys.”

Eddie snatched up a pillow and smacked the side of Richie’s face with it, nearly knocking off his glasses. “Do you  _ want  _ to start World War Three?”

“I’m a lover, not a fighter, baby.” He sat up on his heels and draped his arms across Eddie’s shoulders because he was near, because Eddie so rarely felt sorry for him and he had to take advantage of this. “Hey, speaking of, wanna play Mortal Kombat?”

He expected him to decline, but Eddie shrugged against his embrace. “Sure.”

Richie’s parents were so relieved that he had finally emerged from his room that they

forgot to enforce their “no video games after 10PM” rule. His mom even popped a bowl of popcorn for them before disappearing upstairs to her bedroom. They played in relative silence, only speaking to swear at each other. Eventually Eddie conceded that it was way too late by Sonia’s standards, even with Bill as an alibi, and Richie followed him out to the driveway where Eddie had left his bike lying on its side like a wounded animal. 

“Um, thanks. For checking in on me.”

Eddie made a flapping movement with his hand, as if to brush the thought away. “Like I said, you weren’t answering the phone. Someone had to make the sacrifice.”

“Jesus, you’re so noble. You could probably get knighted for such nobility.” Richie pantomimed unsheathing a sword from his nonexistent belt and pretended to place its imaginary blade on each of Eddie’s shoulders in turn. “Sir Edward, I knight thee for stooping so low as to visit your most craven friend in his time of woe. Hey! That rhymed!”

“Craven? Where’d you get that, Ben’s SAT vocab book?”

“From the genius of my very own brain, Sir Edward.” He made the same sweeping motion with his invisible sword. “I think you’re supposed to be on your knees when you get knighted. Oh, now that gives me an idea,” he added, wiggling his eyebrows.

“Ugh.” Eddie swung his leg over the seat of his bike. “This is why no one else is nice to you.”

“You’ve always loved me the best.” Richie batted his eyelashes.

“Yeah, that’s probably true. Good night, Rich.” Eddie sped down the Toziers’ driveway and out of sight before Richie had time to wonder what he meant by that.


	2. Chapter 2

Richie and his parents had attended the Uris family’s Seder as far back as he could remember. The Toziers weren’t particularly committed to the faith—Richie’s mom sometimes joked that she couldn’t keep track of all the holidays—but when the Rabbi’s son invited you to his family’s Passover feast, you couldn’t really say no without sounding like a sacrilegious asshole. Richie knew that Stan loved celebrating Passover because everything had to be done in a specific order, the same each year. Stan liked rituals. It was why he had dug the shard of glass into each of their palms that afternoon in the Barrens, the reason for his insistence that they remember. The others had been startled when Stan picked up the Coca-Cola bottle and shattered it against a rock but Richie had seen the concentration on his face when he recited Birkat and the look of calm that softened his features when they sang together, his spine as straight as usual but his shoulders slightly less tense. People said that the devil is in the details but Richie figured that the details were where Stan found God. 

Richie liked the tradition of it, too, even as he complained to his dad about needing to button his shirt all the way to the neck on their drive over to the Uris house. He liked searching for the afikomen after dinner, even though they were all a little too old for it, and he liked listening to Stan and his sisters vie for the best parts in the chad gadya, which always seemed to be a source of endless debate no matter anyone’s age. Stan’s sister Laura was home from her second year at Bowdoin and she made a point to grill Stan mercilessly about his prospective college career between spoonfuls of matzo ball soup.

“Have you decided what you want to major in?” she asked.

“Probably business,” Stan replied, fiddling with the corner of his napkin.

“Ugh, I can’t  _ imagine _ . But good. You,” she said, turning towards their fourteen-year-old sister Danielle, who just stared back at her impassively, “are gonna have to be, like, a doctor or an astronaut or something just so Mom and Dad get off my back about this liberal arts degree.” 

“You know we’ll support you no matter what you do, honey,” Mrs. Uris said sincerely, but Laura looked doubtful. Richie thought that Stan studying business made sense. He was good at lining up all those numbers that just made Richie’s head swim. 

The Urises’ Seder finished close to midnight which was definitely past curfew but his parents were with him so it didn’t count. His dad drove them home, the car radio tuned to UMaine’s station. College radio tended to get pretty weird around this hour, but tonight it was just the Grateful Dead’s greatest hits. Richie thought Jerry Garcia was corny but his parents seemed to dig it, bobbing their heads in time with the music until they pulled into their driveway.

Richie lay in bed that night and thought about the future. The end of the school year was suddenly so clear, like when he messed around with Stan’s binoculars and the blurry image through the glass abruptly crystallized into a cool bird or—more likely—Bill or Eddie making a face. Richie had been purposeful in his college selection process, more deliberate than he had been about anything in recent memory: the schools had to be likely to accept him and they had to be far away. All of the Losers except Bev had been hesitant to stray too far from the New England area, either due to parental pressure or the unpronounceable anxiety of relocation. Besides Ben, none of them knew what it was like to live anywhere that wasn’t Derry. It made sense that Bev wanted to be as far away as possible from the town—it made sense for any of them, really, but Richie’s parents had been disappointed when he presented them with his list of schools in December.

“Oh, Richard, these are all on the West Coast,” his mother had intoned. Her frown deepened as she read down the list of schools that Richie had handed her.

“Half of these are in the Bay Area. What the hell’s got you so interested in San Francisco?” his dad asked, to which Richie did not reply. His mom leveled a gaze at him that he tried to avoid, feeling his face burn.

“Well, we’re excited for you regardless, sweetheart,” she said eventually. “We just would have liked you a little closer to home.”

“Good on ya, kid.” Richie’s dad clapped him on the back. “You’ll only be a plane ticket and a couple hours away.” Put like that, California seemed simultaneously too far and too close. Richie told himself that he had always wanted to get the hell out of dodge anyway and that the spectacular trauma of Summer ‘89 had only exacerbated that desire, but when he found out that his friends were mostly trying to remain within the Eastern Time Zone he had begun to doubt his prior adamance. 

Richie did want to leave Derry, that much was true. But he didn’t want to leave his friends. He tried to imagine himself at college in some vaguely Californian setting. He had never even been to California, he didn’t know what it was like out there—probably everyone walked around with surfboards in hand. Maybe he would replace his glasses with contact lenses or get his ears pierced or start going exclusively by Richard, the way his mom always wanted. (He had floated Dick as a new nickname but that was too obvious even for him.) Maybe he would make new friends,  _ cool  _ ones, friends who hadn’t seen him through every awkward stage of adolescence. Maybe he would meet other guys like him, who weren’t as chickenshit about their identities, and maybe he would even touch one of them, let himself be touched, without having to turn it into a gag. This thought more than any of the others sent a jolt of...something...deep in his gut. But of what? Want? Fear? Richie should have creamed himself at just the thought of being able to say the word “gay” out loud in a non-joke context, but when he actually tried to picture himself hooking up with another guy his blood ran cold. He didn’t think he could do that with any random stranger, with someone who had only known him since the school year started. 

The fact of the matter was, of course, that he couldn’t picture himself getting it on with any random stranger because Richie didn’t  _ want  _ to do it with anyone except Eddie and maybe River Phoenix. But River was a movie star and also dead, whereas Eddie was his best friend and very much alive. The alive part was good, but the best friend part had some pretty serious implications. He loved them all, obviously. He had crushed on them all, too, at various points during the height of his pubescent delirium (even Bev, which was  _ so  _ fucking weird in retrospect). But it always came back to Eddie, his rapidfire speech and big brown eyes. Sometimes, when he was feeling extraspecially generous with himself, he imagined that he might one day figure out how to be sincere and tell Eddie how he really felt. Eddie would bluster and ask if he was serious and Richie would say, “As a heart attack, baby.” And then Eddie would roll his eyes and lean in for a kiss and fireworks would explode in the background or something. 

But he didn’t often feel that generous. Richie knew he was setting himself up for failure, the way he had set himself up for failure by only applying to schools on the other side of the country, schools that would never want someone like Trashmouth Tozier to set foot on their campuses. 

All the joy he felt earlier at the Urises’ Seder was drained from him. He tried to cling to that thought of college anyway, pushing away the doubt. He could reinvent himself next year. Maybe he would come back for winter break completely unrecognizable to the other Losers. Maybe he wouldn’t come back at all.

April trickled past in a steady stream of correspondence from various institutions of higher education. Richie got into the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State, but he was still waiting for the last couple schools. 

He didn’t really know what he expected to happen, but getting into UC Berkeley definitely wasn’t it. When he arrived home from the quarry just before dinnertime he was mostly preoccupied with not seeming as stoned as he was. There was a fat manila envelope addressed to Mr. Richard Tozier at his regular seat at the dinner table.

“Right, what’s all this then?” he said aloud in one of the best iterations of his British Voice yet. Shame that no one was around to hear it and marvel at his skills. He picked up the envelope, saw that it was postmarked from Berkely, CA, and instantly dropped it back on the table like a slice of bread fresh from the toaster.  _ Fuck _ . 

“Richard, is that you?” His mom’s voice carried over from the kitchen, clear as a bell. 

“Yeah, it’s me. Who but R. W. Tozier?”

“There’s something on the table for you,” his mom continued. “Did you open it?”

“Not yet,” he yelled back. “I’m, uh, going to my room.”

“Be down in twenty to set the table.”

Richie was pretty good at interacting with his parents under the influence of marijuana, especially at dinnertime when he typically plowed through his meal as quickly as possible regardless of any substances he may or may not have previously consumed. It frustrated his mother to no end. He could get away with not joining in the dinner table conversation if he was too busy shoveling food into his mouth, but this was definitely something his parents were going to want to talk about.  _ Fuck and also shit.  _

He picked the envelope back up and stuck it under his arm as he trudged up the stairs, remembering too late that his pits were pretty rank and liable to permanently stain the precious cargo inside the envelope. He set it down on the bathroom counter to rummage through the medicine cabinet with both hands. The eye drops were nestled behind a whole psych ward’s worth of antidepressants, all labeled with his father’s name. Looking at the bottles and the pills inside of them made him think inevitably of Eddie, and he wondered if he would ever  _ not  _ associate that particular shade of plasticky orange with the Kaspbrak residence. He was rarely invited into their house for reasons Sonia thought were self-evident despite the number of times Richie had showed up on their front steps anyway, begging to be let inside. The bulk of Sonia’s lurid tracksuit always prevented him from seeing into the house as she stood in the doorway, but he could detect movement behind her and the occasional frustrated, “Mom, please let him in.”

Sometimes, if they got lucky, she relented. Richie learned to time his impromptu visits so that he showed up just as the evening soaps were set to start, when Eddie’s mom was least inclined to stand outside and argue with Richie for fear of missing an essential detail about whatever doctor was cheating on his wife with whichever nurse. Or something. Richie had never seen a single episode of  _ General Hospital _ , not even when he was home sick from school and there was nothing else on TV. No way.

The interior of the Kaspbrak house was just as unpleasant as the woman whose name was on the mortgage. The TV set could usually be counted on as the only light source, and it illuminated the clutter of the living room in flickers of blue and white. Actually, Richie wasn’t sure if ‘living room’ was the right word, because it didn’t look like a lot of life went on in there. Maybe ‘den’ was more accurate: dark and subterranean, cut off from the rest of the world. More than anything, Richie remembered being startled by the sheer amount of medicinal ephemera everywhere. He wasn’t squeamish about scalpels or needles—his dad was a dentist—but for some reason, the sight of so many pill bottles scattered on seemingly every flat surface turned Richie’s stomach every time he went over there. 

Richie managed to get the drops in his eyes after only half a dozen attempts. He blinked once, twice, and stared into the mirror. Without his glasses, his field of vision was reduced to about ten inches in front of his face; beyond that, everything was just colors and vague shapes. Once they had all been engaged in a heated discussion about who would survive the longest in an apocalypse and Richie had (subtly, he thought) proclaimed his allegiance to Eddie because he felt he was best-equipped to protect him. At the very least Richie could use himself as a human shield.

“No way am I getting stuck with you,” Eddie had protested. “What if your glasses got broken? You’d be useless! You think they have opthamologists in an apocalypse?”

“Hey, that almost rhymes. Stan, drop a beat!  _ I’m an opthamologist and I’m stuck in an apocalypse, my rhymes comin’ atcha just like a rhinoceros… _ ”

At which point everyone had groaned and booed Richie off the metaphorical stage. But Eddie had told him later that he would have picked Richie to survive the longest. “Just because, you know,” Eddie said. “You don’t ever give up.” 

_ _ Richie thought he would defend Eddie from anything. He had done it before, after all. He didn’t know how he would manage to do it from the other side of the country, but he would sure as hell try.

Richie threw the envelope on his desk and flopped down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. For some reason, he couldn’t open the envelope, even though he knew that it was an acceptance based on its size. The cracks in the paint on his ceiling were the same as they always had been—it was strange to think that in the fall he would no longer wake up to the vaguely phallic silhouette above his head that had greeted him every morning since first grade. 

Richie’s parents were irritated that he still hadn’t opened the envelope when he came downstairs for dinner. They made him leave the table to retrieve it, and he sliced open the thick manila paper with his butter knife in front of them.

“Dear Mr. Richard Tozier,” Richie read aloud, “it is with great excitement that we welcome you to the University of California, Berkeley, for the upcoming 1994 fall semester…”

Richie’s parents beamed at him from across the table, offering their congratulations. His dad lifted his bottle of beer as a toast and his mom reached over to squeeze his shoulder. Richie forced himself to smile back at them, but for some reason he couldn’t share in their excitement. He was furious at himself—this was his ticket out of Derry! It was a great school and clearly someone at admissions had taken pity on him in a grand act of charity. But it was suddenly too much to think about, and he scarfed down the rest of his mom’s shrimp scampi in silence.

The phone rang thrice before someone picked up—it was Sonia, of course; she had a death grip on the telephone especially after 7PM, though Richie couldn’t think of a single person on the planet who would want to call her up for a chat.

“Hello?” The blare of the television bled through the crackle of Sonia readjusting herself on her armchair.

“Good evening, Mrs. Kaspbrak,” Richie said, using the British Voice from earlier to slightly worse effect. “Or should I say Miss Kaspbrak—I’ve heard through the grapevine that you’re single and ready to mingle.”

“Is this the Tozier boy?”

“The Tozier  _ boy _ ? Sonia, darling, I thought you were already very familiar with my manhood.”

The line went dead. Richie hung the phone back on the receiver. It rang again a few minutes later.

“This is why my mom hates you,” Eddie said, his voice caught on an unreleased chuckle.

“She sure wasn’t hating me last night.” Richie pitched his voice higher. “ _ Oh, Richie, I love you and your big co— _ ”

“Beep beep, asshole.”

“All I’m saying is love can look a lot like hate.”

“Why’d you call, anyway?” Eddie asked. “You know it’s time for my mandated post-dinner solitary confinement.”

“I got into Berkeley.”

Eddie didn’t say anything. Richie wondered if Sonia had gotten fed up and finally cut the phone line. “Eds?” he asked after a moment.

“Don’t call me that.” Eddie’s voice sounded far away.

“Gee, a ‘congratulations’ would be nice.”

“UC Berkeley? As in California?”

“You know it, baby,” said Richie. “We’re on a Beach Boys lockdown for the next four years.”

Again Eddie didn’t say anything for what felt like approximately six hours. Richie aimlessly rearranged the magnets on the refrigerator to distract himself. 

“That’s really great, Rich,” Eddie said tonelessly.

“Well damn, Eddie, if I knew you were going to be such a douche about it I would have called somebody else.” Richie’s face felt hot. He rubbed his eyes behind his glasses.

“You didn’t tell anybody else yet?” Eddie asked.

Richie stopped the ‘Duh’ just as it was about to escape his lips. “I just got the letter this afternoon. I mean, I’ve already heard back from USF but honestly the idea of going to a Catholic school kinda freaked me out. Like, I don’t really know all that much about Christianity but it seems wack. Remember the Blues Brothers movie with Sister Stigmata?”

“So you’re definitely going,” Eddie said.

“Well, yeah.” Richie didn’t get what Eddie’s problem was. They had been supportive of him when Mike and Eddie officially decided on UMaine, though they all knew that it wasn’t really either of their choices. Mike had to stay close to help his grandpa, of course, and Eddie...That was another thing they didn’t talk about. “I was always gonna go somewhere in California,” Richie reminded him.

“You just wanna get out of here, huh.” It wasn’t a question. “You and Bev.”

“It’s not like there’s a lot keeping me here,” Richie said.

“Right,” said Eddie. “Well, congratulations. California isn’t ready for you.”

“Don’t I know it.” Richie didn’t express his worry that this feeling of un-readiness was mutual between himself and California.

“I gotta go, my mom is bitching at me about something,” Eddie said abruptly. “See you in math tomorrow. Bye, Richie.”

“Bye, Eds.” Richie hung up the phone before Eddie could complain about the nickname.

The spring’s relative good fortune came to a screeching halt the night of senior prom. Richie and his friends were gathered in the Barrens—not unusual for them, though they were definitely overdressed this time. Beverly held the magenta hem of her dress away from the muddy ground in two closed fists, which was probably going to permanently wrinkle if not completely tear the slinky fabric if she didn’t relent soon.

“Come on, Ben,” she said, her voice pitching into panic.

“My shoes are ruined,” Eddie commented. He looked glumly down at his mud-splattered dress shoes. 

“Mine, too,” Stan agreed. “And my suit.”

“I’m, like, 99% sure that that’s the same suit you wore to your bar mitzvah,” Richie said. “Shouldn’t you have given it up by now?”

“Richie, there is no way I would be able to fit into the suit I wore when I was  _ thirteen _ . Just because some of us didn’t have such a freakishly huge growth spurt in ninth grade doesn’t mean that we all stayed the same size.”

“I’ll show you something freakishly huge,” Richie said, grinning. 

“Oh, my god.” Stan rolled his eyes.

“Besides, not all of us got bigger, right, Eds?”

“Shut up, Richie. And don’t call me that!”

“I can’t help it, you’re just so small and cute.” Richie went to pinch his cheeks but Eddie had already leapt away towards Mike and Bill, who were sitting despondently on a fallen log nearby.

“I’m not that small!” Eddie protested.

“Oh, yeah? Why don’t you take off your pants and prove it?”

Everyone turned to give Richie a withering glare. He held his hands up as if to admit,  _ OK, too far. _

“We’re in a cuh-crisis, Richie,” Bill said. “Now is n-not the time to be f-f-flirting with Eddie.”

Eddie’s face reddened, which Richie might have noticed if he hadn’t immediately jumped on Bill instead, clutching at the lapels of his navy blue tuxedo jacket. “I’m sorry, Billy, I didn’t mean to make you jealous. My dick throbs only for you, I swear.”

“Get off me, you p-perv!” Bill pushed Richie, who stumbled and narrowly avoided landing ass-first in a mud puddle near Mike’s impeccably-shined shoe.

Just then, Ben reappeared from the brush, red-faced and empty-handed. Bev took one look at him and let out a long groan not unlike the sound one might make if they were shot.

“Guys, I am so, so sorry, but I can’t find it. I looked everywhere,” Ben told the group. 

“Remind me again why you thought it was a good idea to hide a whole bottle of rum in the fucking woods?” Richie said.

Ben looked crestfallen. “I was afraid my mom would find it...She’s been really into scrapbooking lately and she keeps going through my stuff to put her in her photo albums. She’s getting sentimental, okay?!” he said when Richie sighed with irritation at the thought of Ben’s mom hunched over a scrapbook, his elementary school report cards carefully preserved in an embossed album. Richie’s parents cared but he didn’t think they cared  _ that  _ much.

They had agonized over the plan: Mike would drive Ben and Bev to Corinth where there was a liquor store that everyone knew didn’t card, and, besides, Bev could probably just wink at the crotchety old man at the counter and rob the entire store blind before the guy’s blood returned from his dick back to his brain. Turned out they didn’t even need to account for this; he hadn’t so much as glanced at Bev as he rang up the bottle of rum. How Ben got assigned to be the keeper of the liquor was unclear to Richie, though he guessed it had something to do with the assumption that his mom was the most hands-off legal guardian, and Bev’s aunt was already suspicious of the amount of incense she burned on a regular basis. But that had apparently gone out the window with this whole scrapbooking thing, which Ben had failed to notify them about. Richie couldn’t blame him— _ he  _ hadn’t volunteered to stash the bottle, after all—but he also couldn’t help but be incredibly annoyed at this whole predicament. 

Bev slung her arm around Ben’s shoulder, accepting defeat. “It’s okay, Benny,” she said. “Sorry I got mad.”

“Well, now what?” Richie asked. “There’s no way I’m going to this thing sober.”

“Me, n-neither,” said Bill. 

Suddenly an idea occurred to Richie. “Hey, Stan…”

“Absolutely not,” Stan said without skipping a beat. “No, Richie.”

“What?” asked Bev, confused.

“Stan’s parents have a shitload of alcohol in their basement from Danielle’s bat mitzvah,” Richie explained. “They don’t even drink except for that crappy kiddush wine so it’s just been sitting there for a year.”

Stan closed his eyes as everyone turned to look at him.

“For real?” Eddie asked.

“You’ve b-b-been holding out on us,” Bill said, sounding genuinely hurt.

“C’mon, Stanny,” pleaded Richie. “Hey, isn’t Laura twenty-one anyway?”

Stan shook his head. “She’s twenty. Her birthday is in the summer.”

“A Cancer would be nice enough to do this kind of charity work,” Bev pointed out, surely knowing that any mention of astrology would just send Stan further into a spiral of rage. 

Finally, Ben said in a tiny voice, “Please?” 

Stan scowled the way he always did when he was about to agree to one of their ill-advised plans. Richie breathed a sigh of relief.

Mike put his hand on Stan’s shoulder. “Come on, it’ll be fine. Your parents won’t notice,” he said gently, in a slightly different version of the voice that he used with Richie over the phone in the middle of the night.

Stan flushed a strange shade of purple that disappeared under the collar of his crisp white dress shirt. “Fine,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Halle-fucking-lujah!” Richie crowed. “Mazel tov, Danielle!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Stan replied. “I call shotgun.”

Stan spoke in a monotone into Mike’s grandpa’s phone as the rest of them all crowded around to hear whether Laura would agree to be an accomplice to their crimes. When Stan explained their quandary, there was a long pause before her voice crackled through the line:

“You owe me big time, Stanley.”

Stan again closed his eyes in relief (or prayer, maybe, Richie thought) as they all cheered silently. Richie knocked his shoulder into Eddie’s and he glanced upwards at him, grinning. Eddie must have shaved right before he got dressed up: his face was smooth and soft-looking and kind of pink. Richie’s brain felt fizzy, like an overshaken soda can. He dropped his gaze when the muscle in Eddie’s jaw tensed.

They sat on Mike’s porch, jumping every time they thought they heard the sound of tires on the unpaved road leading up to the house. Beverly and Richie passed a cigarette between themselves while Stan complained about the smell getting into his clothes.

Finally, the square headlights of Laura’s Honda Civic shone through the encroaching darkness and everyone leapt to their feet. Stan solemnly approached the driver’s side of the car like a man walking to the gallows.

“Here,” Laura said, tossing a water bottle full of clear liquid at her brother, who just managed to catch it. “You’re welcome.” She sounded surprisingly cheerful.

A chorus of thanks rose up from the group, one particularly earnest shout from Ben.

Laura narrowed her eyes at the cigarette in Richie’s hand. “You better not start smoking, too,” she said to Stan. He shook his head, which seemed to satisfy her. “Well, alright. Have fun, losers. Be safe, use protection, and  _ don’t  _ drink and drive! Call me if you need anything, seriously.” She drove off, watching them through the rearview mirror, blasting The Cranberries.

“‘Use protection?’” Richie repeated when the car had disappeared. “Which one of us does she think you’re boning? Or are you seeing someone on the side?”

“In exchange for the alcohol you have to promise not to make any more jokes about dicks, pussies, or any situation in which the two may come in contact,” Stan said tersely. Eddie snatched the bottle from his hand and unscrewed the lid.

Richie chose not to comment on Stan’s use of the words ‘dick’ (not that unusual) and ‘pussy’ (extremely jarring, for some reason) and instead acquiesced, “OK, no dick-in-vagina jokes. What about dick-in-ass jokes?”

“Eugh, this smells like my mom’s nail polish remover,” Eddie said. He passed the water bottle to Bill, who sniffed it and promptly retched.

“None of those jokes either.”

Richie shrugged. “Here, gimme,” he said to Bill.

“We have to be at school in, like, thirty minutes,” Bev said, glancing at her watch. “We’re gonna have to chug that shit.”

Richie drove them all to the playground a couple blocks away from the high school. Stan still rode shotgun while Bev sat on Mike’s lap and Eddie on Bill’s, the latter of which Richie pretended to not notice even as his eyes kept flicking back to the rearview mirror. Ben was sandwiched rather unhappily in the backseat between the four of them. They peeled themselves away from one another once Richie had parked the car and began passing the water bottle around. Following Bev’s advice, they attempted to quickly drink as much vodka as possible without getting sick.

“This sucks, Stan,” Eddie said, grimacing as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“We should have gotten mixers,” Mike commented. He pinched his nose before taking a sip from the water bottle.

“I think Laura picked the worst one just to punish me for bothering her,” Stan said miserably. 

“Get over it, Stanny boy!” Richie cried. “The liquor has been procured and our dear Haystack has been saved from a lifetime of abuse for losing the rum in the first place. The senior prom must go on!”

“We’re almost out of this f-f- _ fucking _ town,” Bill said, and they all drank to that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> passover is a jewish holiday that celebrates god helping the israelites escape slavery in egypt in the book of exodus. a seder is the feast held on the first night of the holiday. birkat is part of a prayer said after meals. the afikomen is a piece of matzo that's hidden during the seder and the kids have to find it after dinner. the chad gadya ("one little goat") is a song sung at the end of the seder that has different parts assigned to each singer where they get to make animal sounds which is a pretty big deal as a kid (hence why stan and his sisters bicker about who gets which part). ALSO i'm aware that pesach would have fallen in late march in 1994 rather than early april but whatever!!  
(also bill initiates the blood ritual in the movie but stan does it in the book which i think makes more sense. so.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [i urge you to listen to this prom playlist as you read for maximum levels of authentic corniness](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1YSJxEcrrHkxniVJWnRn3y?si=TnFVvkF3SE6jIyDJTpQ7Sw)

Being drunk at school was weird. Really weird. Prom was weird to begin with—Richie was positive that even the most popular kids would one day look back at these photographs and cringe, though he had to admit that they definitely  _ looked _ like they thought they were hot shit as they posed for pictures in front of the palm tree-patterned backdrop. The dance’s theme was Island Getaway, a choice that Richie had thus far been only sort of able to parse, but it didn’t seem like student council had been very scrupulous with the decorations: the palm trees were joined by Hawaiian leis strewn haphazardly about the room and jungle animal cut-outs as table centerpieces. They probably would have been better off picking Nova Scotia as their island, given that it was way closer to Derry than anywhere tropical, and Canada was exotic in its own right. That’s what Richie would have suggested, anyway. Above the swarm of students, the traditional balloons and streamers in every color of the visible light spectrum hovered anxiously in the rafters of the school gymnasium, as if in anticipation of the destruction they were sure to be subjected to as the night wore on. The Losers filtered into the gym, wobbly on their feet but not so much that the parent chaperones were likely to notice. Not one of them glanced for too long at the red balloons stuck to the ceiling.

The room was already hazy with sweat and hormones and the frothy beat of Madonna’s “Holiday” blasting through the speakers at the opposite end of the gym. Beverly’s still-short hair was pulled back from her face by purple butterfly clips that matched her dress, and she looked radiant even as her face contorted in disapproval at the current music selection—perhaps one of Bev’s most mysterious qualities was her undying hatred for Madonna. 

“Come on, Beverly, you gotta dance to Madonna,” Richie told her, clapping slightly off-beat to the music. “ _ Celebrate! Woohoo! _ ”

Bev grinned and crossed her arms to indicate her refusal.

“What, did you think they were gonna play ‘Pretty on the Inside’ at our prom?!”

“Not in this town.”

“We  _ are _ the coolest motherfuckers here,” Richie agreed. “Everyone else is a total square. I pity them all.”

“H-how can you. Call us sss-squares when we’re the ones who. Just got drunk with you in the playground p-parking lot?” Bill asked. He made an extra effort to be deliberate in his speech, maybe because he saw how quickly alcohol tanked his friends’ abilities to talk normally. Not that they were really that normal to begin with.

“You guys are a different kind of squares.” Richie pushed his glasses up his nose and wracked his brain for the geometry knowledge that he had immediately purged from his memory after tenth grade. “You guys are rhombi.”

“That just might be the n-n-nicest thing you’ve ever called m-me, Rich,” Bill pointed out, not inaccurately.

Eddie was over by the drinks table, talking to some track guys and their dates. One of the girls leaned towards Eddie to touch the knot of his crimson tie, apparently uninterested in the boy she had come to the dance with. Richie turned back towards Bill and Bev. “Let’s dance, losers,” he said, and sank into the crowd. 

None of them could really dance but lack of talent never stopped Richie from doing anything. The alcohol made them all a bit loopy, and they jumped around with arrhythmic abandon to Ace of Base and Coolio and that one Warren G song which Stan somehow knew most of the words to. They cheered when “Under Pressure” came on and then immediately booed when they realized it was “Ice Ice Baby” instead. At the first dip in tempo, Richie snatched Beverly’s hand before Ben or Bill got a chance, feeling only the tiniest bit like a dick.

“May I have this dance, m’lady?” Richie asked her, bowing at the waist.

“Only because I’m feeling nice,” Beverly replied. She linked her arms around Richie’s neck as Aaliyah’s soft voice spilled out of the speakers. “Plus I actually like this song.” 

They swayed stiffly back and forth for half a verse before Bev leaned further into him, resting her cheek on his shoulder. “I can’t believe we’re almost out of here,” she murmured.

“Yeah,” Richie hummed.

“I love you, you know,” Bev said. “I love all of you guys. My boys.” Her voice was whispery-fond and Richie felt like his chest had split open. Sometimes he still couldn’t believe that he got so lucky to find a group of friends like the Losers. Sometimes he still couldn’t believe that Beverly Marsh had ever given them the time of day way back when. She was really one of the bravest people Richie knew, brave like jumping from the cliffside into the quarry without a moment’s hesitation, brave like the infinite kindness she was still capable of despite everything. She was brave enough to not hate the world even though it would have been so easy for her to do so. Bev continued, “I was gonna save it for your yearbooks but a sober tongue...Wait, no. A drunken tongue speaks a sober mind.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell the others about how you’re secretly a huge sap. They all think you’re a badass bitch but I know the truth.”

Bev pulled back and gave him a look. “Who says badass bitches can’t get emotional sometimes?”

Richie shrugged without removing his hands from her hips. “Just me, I guess.”

“Just you,” she echoed. “Will you come visit me at Lewis & Clark?”

“Fuck no! What is there to do in Oregon? You should come to San Fran,” he told her.

“Not unless you come to Portland first.”

“What are you talking about?” Richie asked. “I’ve  _ been  _ to Portland, baby, it’s only a couple hours away!”

Bev twirled away from him, laughing. “You asshole,” she said as she drifted

over to Mike and Ben, who were guffawing at Bill and Stan dancing together. It looked like they were trying to waltz but neither of them could decide on who was meant to be leading so they kept tugging each other back and forth, stumbling over each other and giggling madly. Richie was going to miss them all so much. He was going to be walking around the Bay Area with six phantom limbs, like some kind of fucked-up mutant octopus. 

Eddie reappeared at Richie’s shoulder, pink-cheeked. “Hi,” he said.

Richie wanted to bite the smile off his face but instead he cried, “Eddie Spaghetti!” and dragged Eddie close to his side, raising his closed fist as if to deliver a noogie and then thinking better of it. “Can you believe that I got stood up by my hot date? I didn’t even get a full dance.” He slid his hand down to Eddie’s upper arm and squeezed.

Bev gave him the finger. “Eddie, you have my permission to take over where I left off but if he breaks your toes, it's not my fault.”

Eddie laughed and shook his head. “I didn’t bring enough ibuprofen to get me through the pain of being crushed by Trashmouth’s Wile E. Coyote feet.”

Richie moved away from him, mock-devastated. “Excuse me, Edward, I’ll have you know that my feet are a perfectly normal size for my height, thank you.” He leaned back into Eddie’s space and waggled his eyebrows. “Besides, you know what they say about big feet…”

Eddie slapped a hand over Richie’s mouth. “Beep beep,” he said.

Richie dragged his tongue across Eddie’s palm. When Eddie jumped back, shrieking and wiping his hand on his waistcoat, Stan rolled his eyes and asked, “Honestly, Eddie, how did you  _ think  _ that was going to end?”

The dance continued with few upsets. Beverly claimed to have witnessed a girl puking technicolor on to her friend’s white prom dress in the bathroom and Richie said that’s what you get for wearing white anywhere that wasn’t a wedding. When Mike pointed out that all of the boys were wearing white dress shirts, Richie pretended he couldn’t hear him over “Whoomp! There It Is.” Bill  _ and  _ Ben each got to dance with Bev at some point while Mike and Stan watched and Eddie laughed at Richie when he threatened to hock a loogie into one of the punch bowls if they didn’t stop playing sappy slow songs. “Loser” by Beck came on and it was a little on-the-nose but they scream-sang the chorus together anyway:  _ I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?  _ Richie wanted to think it was corny but part of him felt like they should be allowed to have this one thing, just for now. 

Around midnight, all of them began their trek back to the Denbroughs’, who lived a few blocks from the high school. It might have been a funny sight, if anyone in Derry ever drove around past 10:35PM, to see the group of teenagers stumbling around in their half-disheveled finery. Bev was barefoot against the pavement, black high heels swinging from her hand, and Richie had knotted his tie around his head. 

They made their way up the stairs of the Denbrough house with careful stocking feet steps, one after the other. Richie thought of elementary school field trips, the buddy system where they had to hold hands and march two by two off the schoolbus towards the entrance of the zoo. Richie and Stan were almost invariably paired together because of their last names and Stan held Richie’s hand with a strength that always surprised him, squeezing extra hard in excitement when they passed the aviary. Actually holding Stan’s hand had never prompted the same onslaught of emotion brought on by just the _thought _of holding Eddie’s hand. Richie remembered the bright spot of feeling that bloomed in his chest when he glanced through the lush canopy of the spider monkey exhibit to where Eddie stood, one hand inching towards his fanny pack and the other in Debbie Kates’ grip. They were too young for it to matter yet, really—the buddy system stopped requiring physical contact the next year in third grade, when rumors of cooties began to run rampant and a boy and a girl couldn’t so much as _look _at each other without the rest of class hooting and hollering in response. But Richie saw Eddie’s hand in Debbie Kates’ and wanted, in some inarticulable way, to be her. Except not really, because he hated Debbie Kates, hated her more than he hated Dr. Doom and even Eddie’s mom, which Richie illustrated with a firm shove to Debbie’s shoulders as he and Stan walked by them. Bill had laughed from the other side of the exhibit and Stan had looked horrified and Eddie had screamed at Richie once he helped Debbie back to her feet. And Richie had been vaguely aware of having accomplished his real goal, which wasn’t to be someone else but to get Eddie to look at him rather than the spider monkeys or Debbie Kates’ strawberry blonde curls.  Now, in the darkness of the Denbroughs’ upstairs hallways, Eddie looped his arm through Richie’s and leaned on him as they stumbled into Bill’s room. They all piled blankets and pillows onto the carpet. Beverly, who had earned the coveted privilege of sleeping (alone!) in Bill’s bed, went into the bathroom to change out of her dress while the rest of them attempted to undress without falling over and breaking something. 

“Sorry they didn’t play any New Kids, Haystack,” Richie said once they were settled into their makeshift beds. Richie lay closest to the door because it made him feel brave, something he wouldn’t tell anyone because it barely made any sense. But if something came through that door, Richie would be there to block it, or distract it, or something. He would do it for them. Eddie was curled up in Bill’s grandma’s afghan blanket about a foot away from him, already on the brink of sleep.

“Oh my god, I’m gonna be forty years old and you guys are still gonna be making fun of me for the music I liked in eighth grade,” Ben groaned. 

“Eighth grade?” Mike’s voice came from near the window where a slip of streetlight bled into the room from under the curtain. “You were literally humming ‘Step By Step’ the other day.”

“Damn, Hanlon,” Richie said. “I thought you two were sworn to secrecy by some Future Librarians of America contract.”

“If we were—and I wouldn’t tell you, because you wouldn’t enter a library unless someone held a gun to your head—it definitely wouldn’t cover Ben’s love of boy bands.”

They chattered on like that for a while until, one by one, they all succumbed to sleep. Except for Richie, who lay awake on the floor, head and stomach both sloshy with the shitty vodka from earlier that night. Eventually he got up and stole outside in his T-shirt and boxers, a pack of Newports in hand.

He sat on the back steps of the Denbroughs’ house and smoked. He wished it were a joint rather than a cigarette but you had to take what you could get, and even he could admit that it was poor form to go rifling through a lady’s purse on prom night to rob her of her drugs. There was a birdbath in the far corner of the lawn, half in the shadow of a slightly-overgrown redbud tree. Nestled in the soil in front of the fountain was a small marble plaque which Richie couldn’t read from this distance but he knew was in memory of Georgie. He wondered if the Denbroughs would take the monument with them when they eventually moved out of Derry, the way they would never be able to do for Georgie. He shivered. Even though it was mid-May, the late night air was cold and Richie wished he thought to bring a blanket along with the Newports.

The door creaked behind him and Richie jumped about a foot in the air. The cigarette fell from between his fingers and rolled across the flagstone walkway.

“Jaysus, Eds, I could’ve set the whole house on fire,” Richie said. He bent to retrieve the cigarette.

“If Mrs. Denbrough hasn’t already lit it up then it might actually be fireproof,” Eddie told him, sitting beside Richie on the steps. “She smokes like a chimney.”

Richie shrugged and took a long drag. “All the cool kids are doing it.”

“Gimme one, then.”

“Huh?” Richie turned to look at Eddie. He was staring straight ahead, chin in his hand, eyelids heavy with drunkenness or sleep or both. His hair stood up at the crown of his head like a spread of downy chestnut feathers. 

“I already smoke pot. What’s the difference?”

Richie knew it was late and they were too tired and too buzzed to get into an argument but he still shook his head no. 

“Come the fuck on, Richie,” Eddie snapped.

“S’bad for you,” Richie mumbled around the cigarette in his mouth.

“Oh, for Christ’s s—” Eddie flung his hands in the air and then crossed his arms in frustration. “I don’t know why you’re doing this.”

“Doing what?”

Eddie hugged himself tighter. “Treating me like I’m some stupid fucking kid,” he said. “Like I can’t survive on my own.”

Richie stared at him, uncomprehending. 

“Like, I get it, okay?” Eddie continued. “I’m stuck here while you get to waltz off to fucking California. I feel sorry for me, too! But you don’t have to be so goddamn obvious about it.”

What was going on? Richie could feel the rise of panic inside of him. “Eds, I think you’re proj—”

“I’m not fucking projecting! I know how everyone thinks of me, but it’s  _ you  _ who’s always hovering around like you’re  _ babysitting  _ me or some shit. How come, Richie? What do you think you’re gonna do?”

“ _ Eddie _ , I don’t think—”

“I bet you’re gonna have a real great time at Berkeley, you know, without me there to drag you down. You won’t have to worry about me all the time.”

“What the  _ fuck _ ?” Richie all but shouted. He jammed the cigarette butt into one of Mrs. 

Denbrough’s planters and twisted to face Eddie. “Listen, I don’t know what the hell’s gotten into that weird little Spaghetti Head of yours—”

Eddie scoffed.

“—but I don’t,” Richie finished lamely. “I’m sorry. I mean. I didn’t realize.” The words were caught in the back of his throat like bile or phlegm, sour-tasting and thick so he couldn’t breathe.

“You don’t realize a lot of things,” Eddie said.

Now what the fuck was  _ that  _ supposed to mean? “Eddie—”

Eddie abruptly turned and thrust his arms under Richie’s, pulling him into an awkward hug. Richie sat frozen as Eddie mashed his face into his chest where Bev had lain her head earlier that night. His hands pressed into Richie’s back, warm through the ratty fabric of his T-shirt. Richie’s chest vibrated as Eddie mumbled something into it.

“What?” Richie’s voice came out embarrassingly high-pitched and panicky. Never in a thousand years did he imagine ending his senior prom with Eddie Kapsbrak crying into his arms, unless it was Eddie crying tears of gratitude for having been given the greatest orgasm of his life. 

Eddie turned his head slightly, so his ear was against Richie’s chest. Richie wondered if he could hear the jackrabbit thrum of his heart. “I’m never going to get out of Derry,” he whispered.

Richie still couldn’t move his arms to reciprocate the embrace. “Eddie, that’s not true.”

“How do you know?” Eddie shifted to look up at him.

“Because I know you, Eds. I knew you when you were a little snotnosed kid with an inhaler and I knew you when you were thirteen and told your mom to fuck off and when you helped destroy It and I’m gonna know you when we’re a billion years old and we can’t even remember Derry anymore.” He glanced over Eddie’s shoulder to the abandoned pack of cigarettes beside them. He felt hot and cold all over at the same time. “And I...I’m not gonna protect you ‘cause you can manage everything yourself. You’ve always been able to.”

“What if I can’t?” 

“I’m gonna have to plead the fifth on that one, ‘cause you practically had an aneurysm two minutes ago talking about how you don’t need anyone to look after you.”

Eddie made a snuffling sound that could have been a laugh or another wave of tears. He leant away from Richie to fix him with a gaze, the very gaze that Richie had been trying to be the subject of since he could remember.  _ Watch me, Eddie! Look at me!  _ Popping wheelies in the middle school parking lot, windmilling his arms in the quarry, running his mouth about something,  _ anything _ , so Eddie would turn towards him and Richie could pretend that Eddie watched him the way he always watched Eddie.  _ Eds, look at me _ in the house on Neibolt, the terror in Eddie’s wide wet eyes and how they scrunched shut as Richie shifted the bone and Eddie screamed and Richie felt himself gasp out a sob because he was so afraid he had hurt him even further. 

“I don’t think you’re a kid, Eds,” Richie said. “No more than any of the rest of us are still kids. You’re eighteen, you can have a fucking cigarette if you want.” He made to reach past Eddie so he could offer him a smoke but Eddie caught him by the wrist and pressed his mouth to Richie’s.

It didn’t happen like it did in his fantasies, but most things didn’t happen that way. There were no fireworks, just the hum of the porch light and the sharp sound of Richie exhaling in shock against Eddie’s cheek. His stomach swam and he thought of the girl who had been puking technicolor earlier at school and wondered if he was about to join her ranks. The world seemed to slip off its axis and then right itself again, jostling the planet’s gravitational pull in the process. That would explain why Richie felt so light all of a sudden, untethered to the ground or reality in general. Maybe he  _ had  _ fallen asleep earlier in Bill’s room and this whole thing was just a very vivid drunken fever dream. 

“What the fuck,” Richie whispered against Eddie’s lips. He made himself go cross-eyed trying to look at Eddie without moving. 

“You’re gonna kill me with secondhand smoke anyway,” Eddie told him matter-of-factly. He was always saying things like Richie should have already known—but how in the hell could he have known about this?

“How about I kill you with kindness instead?” He pinched Eddie’s cheek. “That’s how my mama taught me.”

Eddie squirmed away but just barely. “Yeah, well, my mama taught me that kissing boys would give me AIDS, so.” He grimaced when he said it.

“I don’t think that’s scientifically sound,” Richie said. “Besides, uh.  _ You  _ kissed  _ me _ .”

Eddie leaned back into Richie’s embrace. “Yeah.”

“Is...is that okay?” Richie felt lightheaded. “This is not me hovering, by the way, I’m genuinely asking. Even though I have to emphasize again that it was  _ you _ , Eddie Kaspbrak, who kissed  _ me _ , Richie Tozier. So, really, if it’s not okay that might be more of a you proble—”

“Richie.” Eddie touched Richie’s chest, just under his collarbone. His fingertips were little pinpricks of heat against his skin. Richie thought he might pass out.

“Eds.”

“Don’t call me that,” Eddie responded automatically.

“You know, I think we might have just discovered a new way to shut me up,” Richie said.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m gonna miss you when you go to California.” His eyes traced over Richie’s face. Richie watched Eddie watching him, wondered if Eddie could see himself in the reflection of Richie’s glasses, mirrored into each other infinitely. “It’s so far.”

“I know. You were the only reason why I would’ve stayed.”

Eddie blinked. “Really?”

“No, duh, Spaghetti. Well, you and Mike.  _ Oh _ , and Sonia, of course, how could I forget my favorite MILF?”

“Beep beep,” Eddie said.

“Like I just said…”

“Yeah, I heard you, Trashmouth. I always fucking hear you.” Eddie tugged him down for another kiss. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "that one warren g song" is of course 'regulate' featuring nate dogg. 'pretty on the inside' is hole's first album. the aaliyah song playing during the first slow dance is 'at your best (you are love)'.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've gone back and cleaned up the first three chapters so please consider revisiting them for the sake of my sanity lol

The morning after prom all seven Losers parted ways to nurse separate headaches in separate homes, leaving Bill curled on his bedroom floor with his arm slung over his eyes. 

Richie had previously agreed to give Eddie a ride home from the Denbroughs’, a practice he was accustomed to as an apparent one-man chauffeur service, but as he gathered his discarded tuxedo into his arms he worried that Eddie might have changed his mind by now. They had gone back to Bill’s room after they kissed for the second time. Richie thought that kissing Eddie would have caused a direct blast of energy to his dick and/or his body in general but instead it had only made him deeply sleepy, the kind of sated feeling he associated with falling asleep in the car ride home after a long day at the beach, the bone-deep comfort of being carried half-awake to the house in familiar arms. Which was maybe a weird comparison to make, considering it was always his parents who carried him into the house and tucked him into bed, but the point was that kissing Eddie felt like something he had done a million times before, awake and in dreams, familiar and warm and _ right _. 

So they had stumbled back into the house, Eddie’s hand on Richie’s elbow, and then collapsed into a heap of limbs next to the door. When he woke up the next morning, his head throbbed and his stomach gurgled and Eddie snorted very adorably in his sleep, practically sharing Richie’s pillow.

But they hadn’t been alone long enough to talk about it, so Richie approached his own car with a fair amount of trepidation after Mike had departed with the rest of them in his truck. 

Eddie was already sitting in the passenger seat, his eyes closed and head tipped backwards so that Richie thought he might be asleep. He knocked on the window and Eddie startled.

“Fuck off, Rich,” he said, voice muffled, squinting one eye shut against the sun. He smiled, and Richie felt a rush of relief spread from his ears down into his toes. Nothing had changed, not really. Eddie’s smile—his real one, unself-conscious and bright—was still the same one Richie had been chasing after for years. 

“Fuck off? I’m the one giving you a ride, dude,” Richie said, grinning. He climbed inside the car and jammed the key into the ignition. Billy Corgan’s voice leapt out from the car speakers at a frighteningly loud volume and he and Eddie both shouted in surprise, scrambling for the radio controls. Their fingers tangled on the volume knob.

“I want everyone to talk in a whisper for the rest of the day,” Eddie groaned quietly.

“Oh, your poor little Spaghetti head,” Richie cooed. “I didn’t realize you were that drunk last night.” He felt his stomach lurch. Maybe Eddie didn’t remember what they had done out on the porch, and that’s why he was so unbothered this morning? He couldn’t have actually been that drunk, but stranger things _ have _happened...like Eddie Kaspbrak kissing Richie Tozier. Which had happened. His face heated up at the memory, how firmly Eddie had grabbed Richie’s wrist, tightening his grip as he pressed his mouth to Richie’s. It certainly hadn’t felt like a drunken prank.

“I wasn’t _ that _drunk,” Eddie said.

“Umm,” replied Richie.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Why was it always a car? Richie wondered. There was something about that weird private space in between two places that made it ripe for sincerity, intimate and somehow urgent because you knew that you would soon reach the destination and the conversation would be over. You only had so much time. Richie replied, “Do _ you _want to talk about it?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie shrugged. “I feel like we should.”

“Okay,” Richie agreed, drawing out the word. “What do you wanna say about it?”

“_ Christ _, Richie! Do you always have to make everything so difficult?”

Richie again felt his face go warm. “Yes, it’s one of my only talents.”

“That’s so not true,” Eddie said, suddenly serious. 

“Yeah? Name another one, then.”

“You’re good at taking tests,” Eddie said and Richie barked a laugh. “Stop, I know that sounds dumb. But I always get so fucking nervous about tests because I’m worried my brain is going to go totally blank and you don’t have any problem with them and I was always impressed by it. Like when we took the SATs and everyone was losing their shit but you were like, ‘whatever’ and still got a 1400.”

“Oh, please, tell me more about how great I am at taking the SATs, it’s really turning me

on,” Richie said, then instantly regretted it because it was closer to the truth than he should maybe admit. Eddie was _ impressed _by him. His face only got warmer.

“Okay, fine. _ Some _times you’re pretty funny,” Eddie said, and Richie could hear the sly, teasing grin in his voice. Richie thought there must be visible steam coming out of his own ears by this point. “You’re nice when you’re not being an asshole. You’re...Um, you’re a good kisser.”

Richie almost caused Derry’s first traffic pile-up in years but he resisted the instinct to slam on the brakes and instead kept his eyes fixed on the road and said in a strangled voice, “You think?”

“I mean...it’s not like I have a huge sample size. But yeah, I...I liked it.” When Richie didn’t reply, Eddie hastened to continue, “But, like, it’s OK if you didn’t like it—I mean, like, I know we were dr—”

“A sober tongue speaks a drunken mind,” Richie said, turning down the road that lead to the Kaspbrak residence.

“What?”

“Oh, fuck, wait. A _ drunken _ tongue speaks a _ sober _mind,” Richie corrected himself. “Bev said that to me at the dance.”

“Yeah?” Eddie’s voice was fluttery with nerves. “What was she referencing?”

“How much she loves us,” Richie said honestly, and it hurt to remember how tenderly she had said it, hurt like the dig of a dull blade between his ribs.

“Well, the feeling is mutual,” Eddie said.

“That’s what I told her.”

“Do you...do you remember when Ben wrote her that poem?”

Richie seized up in a full-body wince. “_ Yes _ , oh my god.” Back then he had thought he was jealous of Ben for having gotten Beverly’s attention but he realized sometime later that he was really jealous of how Ben was just _ allowed _to write a poem for his crush, how simple it was for him to extend this romantic gesture to the person he liked when it was too risky on too many levels for Richie to do the same. He said it before he could chicken out, skidding into the Kaspbraks’ driveway, “I wish I wrote you a poem. Back then. God, I would have written you so many shitty haikus, Eds.” It was the closest he had ever gotten to the truth, which was that he thought he might feel like this—scared shitless of everything and lovesick over his best friend—for the rest of his life.

It was quiet except for their breathing. Richie wondered how long you could be trapped in a car before you died of asphyxiation. Now that they were parked, he couldn’t use “eyes on the road!” as an excuse to avoid Eddie’s gaze, so he glanced sideways to find Eddie watching him with those big brown eyes, a solemn expression on his face. _ Shalalalala… _

“You can still write me a poem,” Eddie said. “I mean—if you still want to.”

Finally Richie met the other boy’s gaze, turning in the driver’s seat to look at him. Eddie brought one knee onto his own seat, the way he had sat on Richie’s bed however many weeks ago in the wake of Richie’s minor mental breakdown, full of genuine concern and…love? Was that it? “Do you want me to?”

Eddie blushed this time. “Yeah,” he said. “Please send me poems from California. Or letters, or—or mixtapes, or whatever…”

Richie’s brain snagged on the _ please _in that sentence, the sheer earnestness of Eddie’s voice. Everything abruptly fell into place. “Okay, can do, baby,” he said and then cringed. Jesus Christ, talk about earnest. He wanted to die. “Uh...anything else I can do for ya?” he continued in what was almost the Old New Yorker Voice.

Eddie twisted up his face in the way he sometimes did when he was trying to smother a giggle, not wanting to give Richie the satisfaction of the one laugh he really cared about but always unable to hide the happiness in his features. “You could kiss me again,” he said eventually. “If you want,” he quickly added. “My mom doesn’t get back from church until, like, noon, so—”

Richie reached across the gear shift and took Eddie’s face in his hands. The curve of his jaw was the tiniest bit rough with stubble, which became more apparent once Richie closed the distance between them and their mouths crashed together. Kissing Eddie sober during the day was even better than kissing him drunk in the dark because everything was mega clear: the sounds they made together, the jump of Eddie’s pulse as Richie slid his hands down his neck and under the collar of his T-shirt. 

When they pulled apart, Eddie’s breathing was quick and for a second Richie was scared that he was about to have an asthma attack, the first in years, and that it would be Richie’s fault. He felt the rise of panic that had always accompanied such episodes as a child, that feeling of helplessness. But then Eddie sagged back against the passenger seat and huffed a laugh.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Just ‘Richie’ is fine, thanks. Or ‘Richard’ if you’re feeling fancy.”

Eddie flung out his hand in the general direction of Richie’s face, resulting in a not-so-gentle slap that threatened to dislodge Richie’s glasses. “Moron.”

“Dude, what did I just say? I’m _ Richie _, helloo—” 

Eddie leant forward again and pressed another kiss into Richie’s mouth. “I know,” he said. 

“Yeah,” was all Richie could think to say.

“I have to be back in my room before my mom gets home. According to her I’m on pretty thin ice right now.”

“We’re such bad influences,” Richie joked, but Eddie didn’t laugh.

“No,” he said seriously. “You’ve never been bad. Not really.”

Richie’s stomach flipped. “You’re killin’ me, Smalls.”

“Never mind. You’re not bad, you’re the _ worst _ , and I’ve told you a billion times that 5’9” is the _ average height _for an American man—” But Eddie was laughing as he grabbed his tux and dress shoes from the backseat of Richie’s car. 

As soon as Eddie was out of sight, Richie let out the happiest, most embarrassing scream he thought he had ever uttered in his life, except for maybe the one and only time he rode the Canobie Corkscrew.

* * *

The school year ended in a blur. It rained the day of their graduation, just as one last “fuck you,” so they had to have the ceremony indoors. Richie sat a few seats down from Stan in the school gymnasium where they had been kinda-sorta wasted barely a week ago. He zoned out during the speeches, jiggling his leg and swinging his neck so the tassel on his mortarboard flew out in an arc around his head Several rows ahead of him, Eddie sat next to Debbie Kates, whose strawberry blond curls were barely contained by her red graduation cap. The colors clashed, Richie thought unkindly, even though he knew he had no reason to be jealous of Debbie Kates anymore. Old habits die hard, he guessed. 

It was all over way more quickly than he had expected. Part of him was disappointed—_ this _ was the moment he had been waiting for since middle school? But another, bigger part of him practically vibrated with excitement. A flicker of memory from deep in the sewers, how relieved he had felt when they destroyed It. _ Over, _ he thought. _ It’s all over. We’re done _ . And then, a few moments later: _ Now what? _

Richie didn’t know the answer to that question back then, and he definitely didn’t know the answer to it now. He ducked under the bleachers to search for Beverly’s graduation cap which had been thrown towards the rafters perhaps a bit too zealously. Mike and his grandfather stood some yards away, talking to Stan and his parents and his two sisters, who both looked equally bored by the festivities. Beverly’s aunt and Ben’s mom seemed to be competing for who could have the loudest laugh, and Richie’s own parents were deep in conversation with Bill’s parents. He recognized the look on his mom’s face, an expression of grave concern, and part of Richie ached to know that even now, Bill’s parents were more preoccupied by their son who would never age beyond childhood rather than the one who was becoming an adult right before their eyes. In the gymnasium’s far corner, Sonia continued to fuss with Eddie’s gown even though the ceremony was over and Eddie was never going to wear that shit ever again. He glanced over his shoulder at Richie, who waved, and for a split second that smile appeared on Eddie’s face and was gone just as quickly, like Richie was the only one in the world who got to see it. Maybe he was.

Richie managed to corner Eddie when Sonia went to get the car, commanding Eddie to avoid the rain and not catch cold at all costs. He fished in his back pocket and drew out a cassette. Through the plastic case, Richie’s purple-inked “liner notes” were visible. Eddie stared at the tape and then up at Richie.

“Look, I know you said you wanted me to send you shit from California, and I know you don’t really care that much about music, but I wanted to make this for you, ‘cause it, uh, it kind of says what I, like, can’t say myself. ‘Cause I sort of suck at that. Feelings, you know.” Richie didn’t know how this was somehow more nerve-wracking than kissing Eddie, but boy were his palms sweating.

Eddie gingerly flipped the cassette over in his hands, inspecting the track list. Richie knew he could figure out the theme of the mixtape just from the song titles, and he flushed as Eddie’s eyes moved down the list. 

“Also, um, a lot of the songs are, like, about women? ‘Cause guys are singing them? But when I listen to them, I kind of pretend they’re not? So, like...keep that in mind, I guess.” 

“Thank you, Richie,” Eddie said. His voice had a strange, reverent quality to it. He reached inside his gown to slide the tape into the breast pocket of the nice dress shirt Sonia had insisted he wear even though no one was going to see it. 

Richie wished that they weren’t posted up outside their (former!) high school so he could kiss the watery look right off of Eddie’s face, but instead he reached out and socked Eddie lightly in the shoulder. “You were real good, kid, real good.”

Eddie rolled his eyes. Behind them, Sonia leaned on the horn.

* * *

Summer began with surprisingly little fanfare. There were the graduation parties, obviously, and the readjustment to seasonal employment, and the looming threat of impermanence which had always dogged summer. All things considered, though, it wasn’t the worst summer Richie had ever experienced.

On a day where their schedules all lined up, the Losers found themselves at the quarry for what would be one of the very last times. They smoked and listened to the new Beastie Boys album and did not talk about the rising tide of time. Instead, they talked about chickens.

“Hey,” said Mike suddenly and they all turned to him because when Mike said hey, everybody paid attention. “Did you know chickens are prone to cannibalism?

“What the fuck are you talking about, Mikey?” Richie asked.

“Chickens. They eat each other.” Mike looked deadly serious. 

“Like...inherently? They always eat each other?” Ben tried to clarify.

“Like ham—hamsters.” Bill nodded sagely. “H-h-hamsters alway eat their own b-babies.”

Bev and Eddie shrieked in disgust, though Eddie quickly got serious as he further considered the idea. “Would a chicken eat an egg if you gave it one?” asked Eddie.

“Only if you cooked it first,” Stan said, grinning.

“I think a chicken would appreciate a good omelette,” Bev agreed.

“No!” Mike said. “My grandpa told me that, like, when he was a kid, his neighbor had a bunch of chickens and they were all named Angela.”

“Angela!” Bev sounded delighted. “Oh, you know there’s some kind of story there. Named after an ex-lover…”

“Or an ex-lover that got turned into a chicken with a magic spell,” said Richie. 

“She got turned into multiple chickens? Or there were multiple ex-lovers all named Angela?” asked Eddie.

“The point is that he had a lot of chickens and they were all named Angela, okay, and they all started going missing one by one.”

Bill flinched and Richie sucked in a breath through his teeth. Everyone fell quiet for a moment. Maybe one day it would be easier to hear such a casual turn of phrase; it had already grown less painful in the past few years. Maybe one day they could talk about everything. Finally Stan spoke. “So...what happened?”

Mike touched the edge of Bill’s sleeve, gentle as ever, before he turned back to face the group. “Well, my grandpa’s neighbor thought that there must have been some kind of coyote, or a hawk—” Stan’s eyes lit up and Richie slapped a hand over his mouth before the whole conversation got derailed into an intense ornithological discussion between Mike and Stan and exactly zero other people. “—Or maybe even the farm dog, who knows. And the chickens kept disappearing until there was only one left, and they called her the Final Angela. And the neighbor didn’t want the Final Angela to get lonely, so he sent her to live with a friend’s chickens, and then _ those _chickens started getting picked off! So you know who it was that was taking the chickens?”

“Your grandpa?” asked Ben.

“A clown from the sewers?” suggested Richie.

“Beep beep!” shouted everyone at once.

“We were all thinking it,” Richie pointed out, not inaccurately. “Wait, Mike, this was when your grandpa was a kid. Did they even have modern plumbing back then?”

“It was the Final Angela!” Mike exclaimed the way a practiced ghost story-teller would drop a climactic piece of information about the killer’s location. “The Final Angela _ ate _all the other chickens in the coop!”

Bev and Eddie screamed again. “What the _ fuck _are you talking about, Mikey?” Richie repeated, but his shoulders quaked with suppressed laughter.

“You know how they stopped her cannibalistic urges?”

“Please tell us,” said Stan, sounding like he already knew the answer.

“Okay, so there are, like, little red glasses that chickens can wear—”

“What!” yelped Eddie.

“—and the glasses are supposed to stop chicken violence.”

Ben looked deep in thought as he processed this. “The glasses...block their cannibalistic urges?”

“Are the glasses red so they can’t see bl-bl-_blood _?!” Bill demanded to know.

“Maybe it’s better as a preventative measure before their killer instinct is activated,” Stan said. 

“Jesus Christ, who knew chickens were such bloodthirsty little fuckers?” Bev wondered. 

“If only Richie’s glasses blocked his violent urges,” Eddie said with no heat in his voice. He looked at Richie from across the circle. The sun slipped through the leaves above their heads in dappled bursts of light that highlighted the freckles already cropping up across Eddie’s cheeks. Richie imagined drawing invisible lines between the faint marks with his finger, tracing over the soft skin of Eddie’s face, then kissing each one in turn until Eddie squirmed away, laughing. He suddenly remembered that he was allowed to think this, to _ do _this, and he thought his jaw might break from the sheer force of the grin that appeared on it. He stood up, flinging off his glasses into the grass by Ben’s sneakers.

“Oh no! My cannibalistic tendencies have come back to me!” Richie yelled. Eddie screamed as Richie dove at him, the same gust of delighted sound that he had always made when they play-fought when they were younger, like he was constantly surprised by his own capacity for joy. Richie pulled Eddie into a loose headlock, making chomping noises as he mimed taking bites out of Eddie’s head. “Mmm, tastes like spaghetti!” 

“Get off me, freak!” Eddie cried. If anyone else thought that his command was undermined by the way he immediately tried to snuggle deeper into Richie’s embrace, no one said anything about it.

“Guys, I swear this is the best pasta I’ve ever had!” Richie moved his lips against the crown of Eddie’s head where his hair was warm from the sun. “C’mon, everybody deserves a bite.” 

Beverly was the first to pounce after Richie and the three of them tumbled into the grass. Soon the rest of them descended and they tickled and scrabbled at each other like they might have as very young children, if they had all known each other back then. Richie suspected that it didn’t matter when they had all come together as the lucky seven, just that they had come together at all. 

He flopped on his back, exhausted and giddy, and everyone followed suit until they all lay on the ground to face the cloud-marbled sky. It was one of those rare perfect New England summer days, free of humidity and warm long into the evening after the sun had set. Quietly, obscured partially by the overgrown grass, Eddie moved his fingers into Richie’s grasp, and Richie smiled up at the sky.

“Wait, so whatever happened to the Final Angela?” Ben asked after they had lain in a pleasant, giggly silence for several minutes. 

“Oh,” said Mike, long past that topic of conversation. “My grandpa’s neighbor cooked her for dinner.”

“No!” exclaimed Bev. Her laugh came bubbling up in a series of violent hiccups. “Poor, poor Angela!”

They all laughed until their bellies were sore, unafraid and full to bursting with the promise of the future. It was a feeling that Richie didn’t want to ever forget. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you thought i would write two lines of dialogue about a mixtape and NOT spend weeks agonizing over its theoretical tracklist as if i myself were a somewhat emotionally constipated teenage boy in 1994 trying to convey the deep love he feels for his childhood best friend and needed each song to reflect the gravity of my affection? [you absolute fool.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/33vlBaF13K57FTm0Do5SLm?si=uloVrSJKQASFNbmapQcN2g) *
> 
> *i am aware that the of montreal song is anachronistic but it is The richie/eddie song imo so it stays. richie time traveled three years into the future to record the song for this tape or something.

**Author's Note:**

> the title is a nirvana lyric, natch.  
thank you so so much for reading and apologies for such a huge gap in updates lol.
> 
> [regrettably, i am still on tumblr.](https://holdoncallfailed.tumblr.com/)


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